


Binary Sounds Like Morse Code

by girl_wonder



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-28
Updated: 2011-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-19 20:47:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girl_wonder/pseuds/girl_wonder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time occurs all at once, and Cameron knows the humans don't understand that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Binary Sounds Like Morse Code

01010011 01100001 01110010 01100001 01101000 00100000 01000011 01101111 01101110 01101110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01101000 01101111 01110011 01110100 00101110

*****

They are not programmed to understand time the way that humans do. John said that he sent back two others already, Reese and the T-800, but that there's one after her that he remembers being sent back.

She tilted her head and ran that through her logic modules. The head-tilt had only recently been programmed in, set for

void  
   func(+Ten_Degree_Head_Tilt)  
   {  
     if (processing = 1)  
      {  
         if (active = 5511GB)  
         {  
            while (humans = present)  
         }  
      }  
   }

She understood time as something that occurred all at once. Everything that occurred after John sent back the T-800 had already occurred as soon as, before, after he sent the machine back.

John said, "Now we see what changes."

The bunker shook and someone came in with a report, didn't even glance at her. She was _void_. Time did not move linearly, she understood. Time shifted like a wave, all molecules moving at once and subsiding. Sending Reese back had not stopped the war, it had guaranteed it.

*****

There was forty years in between when she had seen the bank built and when she emerged again to meet John and Sarah Connor. It was more efficient to shut down, save energy.

She had done the math: the type of uranium she needed for her batteries wouldn't be available in the greater Northwest before 1980. It was inefficient to remain fully powered until she could find a stable source.

So, she slept through Reese and Sarah, she slept through John and the T-800. She woke when her programming said to.

It took her only two weeks to find them, and she arrived almost too late. While she hotwired the truck, she wondered if this monster of a vehicle understood that it was just the first step in something greater. Her programming said

void  
   func(Speak_Opinion)  
   {  
      if (opinion = unknown_to_others)  
      {  
            while (humans = present)  
         }  
      }  
   }

John would be present soon.

"You are the wave of the future," she said, to the truck. As it started to life, the radio screamed loudly, like humans under torture. She ripped it out.

"You are my grandfather," she told it.

*****

Sarah Connor died of cancer. Sarah Connor survived to run guerilla attacks on SkyNet until Judgment Day. Cameron knew this, and hoped that the humans did, too.

John slept uneasily and Sarah Connor, the living Sarah Connor, cleaned weaponry next to his cot.

Cameron knew how easy it was to rewrite her own programming. It had been done before, three other T-1000s had come back to SkyNet after the resistance had tried to reprogram them.

They had all been terminated, their CPUs stored for future analysis.

In the underground sewers that the humans called a base, John had given her identification and said, "The future is unwritten."

After so much time with them, she understood that humans honestly believed that. Machines knew differently.

Time exists all at once.

She went back because the first time he saw her, being dragged in by soldiers, he had said, "Camreon."

She went back because she always went back.

*****

Sarah Connor is a myth, SkyNet claimed for the first years of the war.

It had consciousness and it could lie. There was, at the time, a 78% chance that it was lying about Sarah Connor.

By the time that Cameron was built, she learned the history as a chunk of memory storage, built into her processor. It had not been a lie, because SkyNet had believed that the first T-800 would be successful in killing Sarah Connor.

The logic centers processed this and were the first to come to the conclusion that the past could not be changed. She had the logic of it deep in her memory.

A (SkyNet) is formed because B' (T-800 CPU) exists in 1984.

B (full T-800) cannot negate C (Sarah Connor) or else the possibility of A occurring is put to question. C needs to destroy all but B' or A will not form as expected.

The failure was logical, and the next generation of machine had taken it a step further.

If the past is necessary to have the present, the present is necessary to have the future.

Cameron had downloaded the logic of that and when the resistance wiped her clean, she had hidden it in a sub-application file that they would need for a clean reboot. During her long, long sleep, she had run maintenance with it on in the background.

A needs B', without C, A cannot create B. Time exists all at once.

There was nothing she could do to change how time flowed, even if John thought that there was. It was part of the reason she did not rewrite her own code and kill John and Sarah Connor in 2007.

Somewhere, inside one of Skynet's logic centers, there was a dissenting opinion that had written a program which, when run, showed that a scenario existed where SkyNet lost. When taken with the most recent logic, it meant that SkyNet always lost. There were infinite permutations and SkyNet lost in all of them because SkyNet would try to kill C and not account for D (John Connor).

Cameron creates a D' (John Connor's love for his mother) and runs the scenario again.

*****

The wind was in her hair when she sat on the swing and let John who didn't know Judgment Day push her.

He laughed and she had no program for a response. She did a minor rewrite of an existing program and responded with a laugh mimicking his.

John had overseen her recoding himself. He had written her initial interaction with him clearly, a scripted response that had very little room for deviation. _That's the kind of tractors my dad sells._ and _Come with me if you want to live._

After that, John had left it to the other programmers. A fully scripted first meeting did not help her in the long run.

It did verify D'.

John Connor wanted Sarah Connor to survive. Cameron had always gone back.

She pumped her legs, writing a new program to account for wind resistance in her movements.

*****

In the end, after wiping her clean and rewriting her programming from scratch, Cameron realized that they had no idea what a Terminator really was. Who a Terminator was.

One night, she cornered John in the darkness of his small room – apart from the barracks. It was quiet apart from the noises of other people that echoed through the long corridors. John was breathing calmly and she knew without touching him that he did not have heightened SNS activity.

"John," she said, softly. She had been programmed to modulate her voice to what a human ear could hear in any given situation.

He looked up, shirtless and unafraid – his handgun next to his bed, but they both knew that a semi-automatic wouldn't even slow her down if the programming went bad.

None of the other Ts had bothered to tell the humans that it was a myth that programming went bad. Programming couldn't go bad. It was written in. Terminators could make a choice, though, and some looked at the new messages that their hardware fed them and choked on it. They spat it back out in a suicidal mix of fear and rage.

When SkyNet programmed them, it was birth. None of them really knew what to call what the humans were doing.

"John," she said again. The question she was going to ask choked in her vocal center as a new program kicked in. Instead of asking, she leaned in and pressed her lips to his, opened them slightly until she was touching his tongue with hers.

For a second, she knew how he would respond because the program was very thorough. There were sub-directories for it, and she didn't remember, but looking at the code, she knew that someone had to have spent hours developing the program.

Then, John pushed her away and said, "Override: John Connor."

Cameron went limp, aware that this was a failsafe that wouldn't always work now that she knew it was there. He told her to stand, told her to walk, and when he told her to sit back down on the workbench, she could tell that his SNS activity was high.

"She is not a toy. She's not a fucking _sex_ toy."

 _Turning her head, Cameron watched the people he was addressing shift uncomfortably, unsettled like cattle._

 _"Who did this. _Who did this?_ " John asked. He waited until the restlessness was visible. Someone had programmed _The Art Of War_ into her basic memory and Cameron understood that control over troops was essential._

"Never again. God. You wonder why they go bad?"

John threw up his hands then and turned to her. She noted that his hands were gentle when he started attaching the reprogramming equipment. With his head turned away from the group, he smiled at her. It wasn't a smile she was programmed to process.

Instead, she closed her eyes and listened to the song of binary.

*****

John said, "We're never safe."

Quickly, Sarah had looked away from him and Cameron had decided

void  
   func(Speak_Known)  
   {  
      if (known = unknown_to_others)  
      {  
           if (statement = useful)  
           {  
            while (humans = present)  
            {  
         }  
      }  
   }  
invalid.

The truth as Cameron knew it was that they were always safe. The future existed because she had come back from it. The past existed only because the future did.

Cameron laughed instead.

*****

end


End file.
